The intervened wardrobe: Making visible the agency of clothes

The fashion industry is permeated by overconsumption. Mass production,
low prices and speed of turnover of trends lead consumers to perceive
clothes as disposable objects. The resulting throwaway culture adds
to the already problematic environmental impact of the fashion industry. To
shift this state of affairs, we propose wardrobe interventions, a method that
uses experimental design practices to collect insights and promote more active
engagements between wearers and worn by leveraging the notion of
material agency. We describe two projects used to develop and verify the
method, to demonstrate how foregrounding the agency of clothes can enhance
values embedded in wearer-worn relationships, and potentially shift
consumer actions.